However, the long answer is that it will forever change the way we will interact with technology.

On the heels of Steve Jobs passing, the iPhone 4Si arrived, somewhat quietly, compared to earlier Apple product releases.  ”S” is for SIRI, a company Apple purchased a few years earlier that specialized in voice recognition software. The 4Si can update your calendar, check the weather, set reminders, play music, and write and send emails and texts, etc. You’re probably already using something similar when you call the utility companies and you’re prompted to speak your selections instead of keying it in.

Like most things that Apple makes, SIRI, will fundamentally change the world yet again. This time it will make us rethink search engines and the optimization requirements they require (SEO).  The battle for first place positioning on Google’s search results can mean life or death of a business lately. Now with programs like SIRI that maybe a thing of the past because search results won’t be based on how many backlinks you have, or the description you use or the keyword density you may or may not have. Now, its all about. your GPS, your likes and dislikes, and what you social media streams recommend. That’s how you’ll now receive your search results.

By forgoing search algorithms and  paying your SEO-way to the top spot of Google for say “Venice beach Italian restaurant”  won’t matter anymore.  As a result, smart small businesses that don’t rely on e-commerce will have to spend even more time optimizing listings on Google places, Yelp, Facebook Places, Foursquare etc.  For instance all Yelp recommendations are already embedded in Siri responses. That means that your Yelp listing matters a lot more than regular optimization.

Soon PPC (Pay Per Click ~ those ad links you rarely click on anyway) will soon become  irrelevant.  If you rely on PPC campaigns to drive traffic online, your business may drop as a consequence.  Let say you own a bakery and it  has a number of good reviews on Angie’s List (…because you offer incentives to all customers  that post reviews). That’s really awesome!  But, what if the Android’s version of Siri comes along (call it Speaktoit) and only includes results from say Chow.com ? If that happens, a major chunk of your social media marketing just disappears. So spend a large percentage of your time focused on optimizing your listings on Social Media, because soon your customers won’t be hanging out on search engines.

read part 2 next….

Internet connections vary around the world. In Africa most international connections are routed through a high latency satellite connection. The minimum page loading time in Gabon for instance about t 3 seconds.

When you design websites for the low-bandwidth environment in Africa, you come across uncommon constraints.  As more  Africans are able to connect to the web, the inequality in bandwidth reception among users is becoming extremely clear.

A “rule” of low-bandwidth development is that images must load  within 10 seconds!
(I know most if us could cook dinner and pick up kids from school in that amount of time)  So all page loading speeds are determined by the size of the elements and the size of external files it references (ie: css, JavaScript, images and multi-media).

Here are a couple sites we just completed for this market segment.

• www.RigAfrica.com
• www.CrewFlightServices.com

Here are some  basic rules of low-bandwidth development & design.

No page should be larger than 25k
Perhaps the most important item..build your pages to load within 10 seconds over 25 kbps connections, which means 25kB is the maximum page size.

Good structure
Give users a really simple navigation menu. Simple colors. Simple fluidity. You’ll find that  you’re actually reaching into the core of your web design zen when doing so  .  Don’t use tables for layout and place the main navigation items at the top of each page so they’ll  load and display first.

Reduce Images Of Course
Yes, good design is possible without tons of images. Always use the style sheets to build layouts and roll-overs for instance.  Also make sure your site is usable if images are turned off in the browser. Condense ( http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ )   all your images for optimum performance.

Make the site Cache-able
Browsers should be able to keep a local copy of the  ”cached” website.

You have to avoid PDFs
Or if you must have it  optimised by using vector-based graphics.

Steve Jobs is the Thomas Edison, Alexander G. Bell, Henry Ford of our time. His ideas in the computer industry have revolutionized all sectors of the economy. He will join the list of other great American inventors.

One day your grandchildren may be attending a school name Steve Jobs High School. The school mascots may be the Geeks with the slogan “Fighting Geeks”.

I sincerely hope he recovers from his health condition and keeps us reminded of what one man can do from his garage.

Below are some facts about Steve.

Steve Jobs (1955 – ) is the co-founder of Apple Computer Corporation who became a multi-millionaire before the age of 30 by revolutionizing the computer industry.

Success begins with passion. Steve would begin his journey by joining the Homebrew Computer Club where he met Apple’s other co-founder, Steve Wozniak.

Success is seeing what others fail to see. Jobs is best known as a visionary, who was able to see the development of the PC industry long before its actual development.  In fact, his electronics teacher at Homestead High, John McCollum, recalled he was “something of a loner” and “always had a different way of looking at things.”

Success is surrounding yourself with talent and skills that you lack. Jobs knew that Wozniak was a much better engineer than he.  Jobs kept his focus on the marketability of the product.

Success is seeking good advice. Jobs received marketing advice from a friend, who was also a retired CEO from Intel, who helped Jobs and Wozniak with marketing strategies for selling their new product.

Success is putting it all on the line. To start their new company, Jobs and Wozniak sold their most valuable possessions. Jobs sold his Volkswagen micro-bus and Wozniak sold his Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator, which raised $1,300 to start their new company.

Success is a result of meeting the needs of others. Apple’s most successful computer, the Macintosh, had an interface that allowed people to interact easier with computers, because they used a mouse to click on objects displayed on the screen to perform some function.  The user-friendliness of the product made it an instant success.

Success is not without setbacks. In 1985, after being ousted from a position of power in his own company, Jobs retired as chairman of Apple Computer.  This was a devastating blow to the young visionary, but a necessary step in his success.

Success is not without subsequent failures. Jobs formed a company called NextStep and planned to build the next generation of personal computers that would put Apple to shame.  It did not happen.  After eight long years of struggle and after running through some $250 million, NextStep closed down its hardware division in 1993.

Success is in the person, not the event. Steve Jobs later founded another company called Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar was founded in 1986; The company has won many awards, including 6 Academy Awards for Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story, and Monsters, Inc.

Success is making amazing comebacks. Eleven years after Jobs was ousted from a position of power at Apple, they rehired the former co-founder in hopes of turning the company around. When Jobs returned, he succeeded and was responsible for one of the most astonishing turnarounds in US history.

Ok so I know Google kinda failed with Orkut as Facebook replaced it. Oh there’s Buzz too…and then Wave..but darn it I know the 4th time is the charm..besides all these past applications were insanely awesome compared to FB’s technology, it was just that they never got people to make the switch. This time my instinct tell me this will be a huge success.

Google+ will have a tough battle mustering people from FB Facebook. Facebook has such a big lead in it’s market. Specially since Google and Facebook are good at different things. You can do alot of things on Facebook because its older and the industry standard in Social media, but Google+ has just started so you have to give it a lil bit of time to compare.

The latest industry to revolutionize is the SUPERMARKET industry.  Web and Mobile join forces to completely reinvent the way we buy our food daily. Think of the possibilities!

The Internet Society is a international nonprofit organization that administrates Web standards, policy and education. They claimed June 8th to be World IPv6 Day and it give enterprises and ISPs (internet service providers) a chance to “stress test” the next layer of IP’s (Internet protocol) to see if it works and what may not. Its a huge wake-up call that it’s time to upgrade the World Wide Web.

Companies like Facebook, Google and Yahoo, will work with ISPs and content-delivery networks to conduct the first global-scale trial of IPv6. For a 24-hour period, participating companies around the world will enable IPv6 on their main services.

This is a chart the explains the 4 fold increase in ip digits (also know as bits)

Its said that in 2023 we will each own 7 devices that will require a unique IP (anything from your phone, cell, tv, tablet, and more..) To support the scaling up, a scheme was developed to allow IPv4 addresses to be embedded within the IPv6 address structure. This method takes regular IPv4 addresses and puts them in a special IPv6 format so they are recognized as being IPv4 addresses by certain IPv6 devices. But since the IPv6 address space is so much bigger than that of IPv4, embedding the latter within the former is actually simple. It’s like driving an over crowded bus into a cargo boat. A much faster one at that. Both have zeroes for the first 80 bits of the address, and put the embedded IPv4 address into the last 32 bits of the IPv6 address format.

Like the conversion of analog to digital TV, this might take some time. But the possibilities of this wider open road are very exciting.

The next day I found out they went with someone else who in fact had proposed 4 times more for the same project? I’m sure you would assume — and rightly so — that they went with a large company or something. In fact, they went with a freelance guy like myself who also works in Los Angeles, does the same work quality, but just charged four times more more for the same project. Did his price tag make them trust him more? I was…. ecstatic. Loosing out on a bid can happen, but that’s not what made me surprisingly glad.It dawned on me that the multi-billion dollar ad world…that swaggering world of luxury offices, overpaid marketing guru’s and endless posturing… was coming down. Yes, just like the travel business, the music business, the banking business…basically anything the web can reconfigure. The three hour meeting I had was not about my bid at all, it was them trying to understand what the hell hit their industry!

During the meeting I remember being asked tons of new media questions. I found myself having to explain some of its features more in detail than normal since it was in relation to the product I was bidding on. I could hear myself thinking ” Birdie you are such a geek..you’re tech-talking yourself out of this bid!”. The truth was that the agency was out of touch. The industry changed over night and they were scrambling to figure it out. Dare I say the ad world is starting to have a very tough time justifying its million Dollar invoices to clients.So with search engine optimization, social media, aps, creative-suite5, cloud computing and a plethora of other ad marketing tools, the playing field for the ad industry has become open game to a new bread of brand engineers. Perhaps they best check the basement, since the mail room guy may know infinitely more about new media than the gang upstairs.